The Author to Her Book

An extended metaphor is a comparison of several aspects of two unlike things. “The Author to Her Book” includes a detailed comparison between mothering a child and writing a book of poetry.

Giving birth to an “ill-formed offspring of [the writer’s] brain” (Line 1) represents the invention of an ugly first draft that is full of flaws. The kidnapping of this unfinished child—when friends usurp her right to determine when and where the text should be published—is the writer’s loss of autonomy. The “raggs” (Line 5) may be a reference to the rag paper colonial papermakers manufactured using cloth scrap, so “rags” might be the poor-quality paper the printers used for the author’s book; it may also refer to the introduction of even more errors into the already flawed draft of the speaker’s book.

Bradstreet extends the comparison between child and text as she describes what happens to the book after this publication. In a metaphor for the revision stage of writing, the speaker bathes, treats, and attempts to shift the joints of the child. However, this care fails to make the child any more presentable—a metaphor for a failed revision process.

The  attempt to replace the child’s rags with “home-spun Cloth” (Line 18) is a comparison between the coarse cloth that people created at home and the inept technique of a writer who has lost control over her own creative process; the handmade nature of home-spun frequently leaves small holes and knots in the cloth, especially if the weaver isn’t skilled.

The last major description of the child is that it has a family that is outside the norms for family during Bradstreet’s time. The lack of a father would have made a child illegitimate by the standards of that time; the speaker’s previous book has no father because, despite the fact that men distributed it, Bradstreet remains the sole author of her work. The speaker as poor mother reflects two things: the speaker’s sense of being taken advantage of by well-meaning friends, and the limits of revision once those friends have disrupted the slow pace of a complete writing process.

An apostrophe is a rhetorical form of speech in which the poet/speaker addresses an absent person or an inanimate object that cannot hear or reply to the speaker. Bradstreet labels the poem as an apostrophe the writer directs to her book. When Bradstreet has her speaker directly address the book, she makes abstractions like the belief in the autonomy of the writer and the writer’s process more concrete to her readers.